Standards Management for Go Ape

Go Ape have always been recognised for their brilliant levels of service and delivery and have seen exceptional growth since being founded in 2002. Their ground-breaking employee ownership system shows a desire for continued growth of the business to benefit both employees and customers.

Focusing on maintaining their well-known excellent standards, Go Ape wanted to continually drive their customer experience and ensure they remain the best in the business. Working with an external expert was an efficient way to gather insights from across the industry and create an innovative training and monitoring system to match their outstanding product.

Core Values

As an outdoor activity provider for all ages, customer experience and perception are an integral part of the Go Ape product. The experience aims to allow visitors to live life adventurously, get out of their comfort zone and develop confidence through exciting activities. Proud of their brand and vision, Go Ape sought to harness these values and ensure all co-owners used them to their best potential. With an amazing 34 sites across the UK, it was important to provide a definitive customer experience to ensure consistency across the brand.

Review

In2action worked primarily with Sarah Adcock, the Customer Experience Manager at Go Ape. The review process started by conducting a site visit and evaluation, looking at the current training modules, brand materials, and a current customer journey at Go Ape. A mystery shopper visit was also completed, to effectively assess the strengths or inconsistencies of the overall product.

As a result, In2action provided feedback and recommendations to the Go Ape team to create a future action plan. Following this, the businesses could collaborate to define excellence and propose how to continue to provide quality outdoor adventures.

Customer Journey

In2action went through each part of the customer experience from booking to departure, so the journey could be mapped out in stages. For each stage of this customer journey, it was clearly defined what ‘great’ looks like and what had to be done to achieve this at each point.

This led to the creation of a Go Ape ‘blueprint’ - a visual step-by-step guide of the customer journey. This considered the arrival of guests, interaction with staff, the activities, and the overall feeling that customers would take away with them following an adventure. This blueprint would help achieve Go Ape’s goals whilst retaining consistency across their vision and company culture.

Training

As with many of our partners, training was an integral part of In2actions work with Go Ape. Once the customer journey was defined, it was imperative that all staff understood what great looked like, and how impactful small actions would be on the customer experience. It was also a great opportunity for us to really get to know the Go Ape team and establish the enjoyment of In2action training!

We guided the Go Ape co- owners through the newly designed customer journey to ensure they were trained on each stage and could be guaranteed to deliver first-class customer experiences. We also redesigned Go Ape’s learning system and implemented a new online training module, as well as our ‘train the trainer’ module. During this, we provided the qualities and skills required by Go Ape trainers to deliver top quality training to their own teams as well as tips on managing groups, presenting skills and engaging candidates.

Following this, we designed and implemented a monitoring system which meant Go Ape could then maintain this excellence and quality by internal observations. In2action are still working with Go Ape in support of their future business needs, through elevated customer experience and training support.

Feedback from Go Ape

“As the customer experience manager for a multi-site national company, I had a vision of where I wanted to elevate our customer experience to. It was quite a daunting prospect thinking about how to implement change and improve behaviour and company culture. I wanted every customer to walk away feeling like we had made a difference to their lives, and that every instructor felt proud of the difference they had made. In2action have made the whole process stress free. They have taken my vision and helped me to develop a strategy with a multi-layer approach to effect change and create a positive effect within every department in the company.

Their energy, enthusiasm and passion is contagious, and we have come away with a real spring in our step since connecting with them. Following In2action’s support, we are excited to make the most of every opportunity we have to improve the customer and employee experience here with Go Ape. We have a great product here, but it is the people that make the experience special. We had to get this training right in order to get engagement, investment and to demonstrate the difference it could make.

Feedback from our teams at site, the Operations team, the wider management team and our customers has blown me away. Having an external company deliver the training too has been a welcome change in dynamic which has been really well received. From the off, Tim and his team were invested in making sure they spoke our language and delivered training which was relevant to us as a company. They have welcomed the collaboration and encouraged me to have as much input as I wanted, which was really important to me. I feel as if I have known them for a really long time! They understood on day 1 what I was hoping to achieve, and they have been with me every step of the way.

I can't thank them enough and I would highly recommend them to anyone hoping to elevate their own offering. They are honestly a pleasure to work with - professional, knowledgeable, but also fun. I'm excited for the future of Go Ape. It makes me so proud to see our teams so engaged with the training and then to read the feedback from our customers. Tim, Lewis, Chris and the rest of the in2action team - THANK YOU, from all of us here at Go Ape but more importantly, our customers!” - Sarah Adcock, Customer Experience Manager, Go Ape

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